As Agnon felt that this strangely intensive bygone world happened
“only yesterday,” but was timelessly valid, so his own fictional world
was alive, pervading all of modern Hebrew culture “only yesterday,”
and can—and should—stand beyond its ostensibly parochial landscape as one of the great literary myths of the twentieth century.

Shmuel-Yosef Agnon's Hebrew novel Only Yesterday (Tmol
Shilshom) was written in Palestine under British Mandatory rule in
the late 1930s, finished in 1943 during World War II, and published
after the war in 1945. The prominent Israeli literary critic Barukh
Kurzweil, a German Ph.D. in literature and a leading authority on
his fellow Austro-Hungarian novelist, pronounced: “The place of Only
Yesterday is among the greatest works of world literature.” Those were
not parochial sentiments of a “minor literature”; similar opinions
were voiced by Leah Goldberg, Hebrew poetess and polyglot, translator of Petrarch and Tolstoy into Hebrew, and first professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and by
Robert B. Alter, Professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at
the University of California at Berkeley, a discerning critic and
scholar of the European novel.

On the face of it, it is a simple story about a simple man, Isaac
Kumer, who immigrated from Austrian Galicia to that cultural backwater, the southern Syrian province under Ottoman rule (the historical Palestine). He arrived with the Second Aliya—a few hundred
secular idealists, mostly Socialist Zionists from Russia, who came to
the Land of Israel between 1904 and 1914 to till the soil, revive “Hebrew labor” and the Hebrew language, and became the founding
generation of Israeli society. Isaac, however, who believed in their

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